Juan Enrique Garrido

AwToolkit: attention-aware user interface widgets

Increasing screen real-estate allows for the development of applications where a single user can manage a large amount of data and related tasks through a distributed user interface. However, such users can easily become overloaded and become unaware of display changes as they alternate their attention towards different displays. We propose AwToolkit, a novel widget set for developers that supports users in maintaing awareness in multi-display systems. The AwToolkit widgets automatically determine which display a user is looking at and provide users with notifications with different levels of subtlety to make the user aware of any unattended display changes. The toolkit uses four notification levels (unnoticeable, subtle, intrusive and disruptive), ranging from an almost imperceptible visual change to a clear and visually saliant change. We describe AwToolkits six widgets, which have been designed for C# developers, and the design of a user study with an application oriented towards healthcare environments. The evaluation results reveal a marked increase in user awareness in comparison to the same application implemented without AwToolkit.

Instructional m-Learning System Design Based on Learners: MPrinceTool

M-Learning is an exciting art of using mobile technologies to enhance learning skills. Mobile phones, PDAs, Pocket PCs and the Internet can be joined together in order to engage and motivate learners, anytime anywhere. The society is entering a new era of m-Learning, which makes important to analyze and innovate the current educational tools. In addition Learner-Centered Design (LCD) is considered to be important especially when new applications are created, it is an evolving design approach for designing tools that supports learners trying to engage in and understand educative practices. To develop and apply the LCD approach throughout the whole life cycle of the system an Instructional System Design process (ISD) which is the science of creating an instructional educative environments and materials that will bring the learner from the state of not being able to accomplish certain tasks to the state of being able to accomplish them. This article proposes a new tool that aims to improve the deficiencies identified in the usual analysis. The proposed tool, called MPrinceTool, provides a new means to interact via mobile technology by using web services that facilitate learners to participate in educational activities and communication with working groups, synchronously, when the students can participate in class and communicate with the teacher and the other students, also they can realize exams and exercises which needs the teacher presence; or asynchronously, which allows students to feel free in realizing their educational activities out of school time.

Integration of Collaborative Features in Ubiquitous and Context-Aware Systems Using Distributed User Interfaces

Collaboration is essential in healthcare environments for a wide variety of tasks and situations. Health practitioners have to perform complex tasks, which in turn are divided in more simple ones and workers can assist each other when doubts or unexpected situations occur. In the latter case, if the situation is an emergency, it needs to be solved first and then, pending tasks are again reorganized within their well-defined agenda. These changing conditions, which might result in an adaptation of the employees’ behavior, create the need of ubiquitous and context-aware software that offers information and functionality based on their needs. Additionally, many healthcare employees need to use the same application through different devices depending on their context, as they are constantly moving around the environment. The system should adapt its display window based on the device restrictions through a distributed user interface. In this paper, we present Ubi4health as a system whose main features include the aforementioned healthcare requirements. The system presents, as a differential factor in healthcare settings, the use of the distributed user interface paradigm within ubiquitous environments, which favours the collaborative work. Finally, we present the outcomes of the usability evaluation performed on the system based on the ISO 9126–4.

Design and Evaluation of a Collaborative System That Supports Distributed User Interfaces

Group work is a fundamental human activity in all areas of life; it is a good exercise to enhance integration and communication among users. In addition, it is highly effective in increasing users´ creativity, thus yielding better and more satisfactory results. This task is very complex; however, thanks to the benefits offered by new technologies, today we can build systems designed to facilitate such collaboration. This paper proposes the “Co-Interactive Table”: an interactive and intuitive system developed to enhance the collaboration in meeting rooms. It is based on mobile devices, RFID technology integrated in panels. This solution offers Distributed User Interfaces and a new style of interaction, which consists of bringing the mobile device close to the panel. To improve collaboration, the workspaces are divided into two spaces, collaborative and public, which consist of a display projected on the wall, and the personal and private spaces, which consist of the users personal device. An assessment has been carried out in order to verify user satisfaction in performing tasks with this system.

Applying Movement Based Interaction in Sitting-Down and Getting-Up Rehabilitation Therapies

People suffering from brain damage present disorders which hinder their daily life. They can be limited when walking, catching objects, climbing upstairs, etc. These common activities are natural and simple for people without those handicaps but those with a neurodegenerative disease or brain damage find an important obstacle in them. In this sense, authors have developed a system whose main goal is to offer an assistant to be applied at rehabilitation centers in order to help patients in their specific disabilities. The system guides users with brain damage to improve or learn the capacity of getting up from a chair. The system analyzes continuously the postures and movements of the patients and guides them. Patients receive indications to know the steps to be performed and how to complete each one of them. A complete user interface shows adequate indications, corrections and complementary information.

PROMESPAR: A High Performance Computing Implementation of the Regional Atmospheric Model PROMES

This paper describes the parallelization process of the code PROMES. The parallel code, called PROMESPAR, has been carried out under a distributed platform (cluster of PCs) and using Message Passing Interface (MPI) communication subroutines.

The use of joint coordinates to monitor patients in a movement-based interaction system

Abstract Movement-based interaction has brought about new possibilities in healthcare environments. Concretely, rehabilitation therapies represent an adequate domain in which this kind of systems can produce significant benefits. In this context, the authors have developed SIVIRE, a movement-based interaction system whose main contributions are a virtual online editor of exercises with the capacity to adapt the rehabilitation to the patients’ conditions and evolution. During the development process, we have considered some aspects regarding the monitoring process to improve the quality and accuracy of the system, such as monitoring the patient’s postures, which is a critical procedure in order to properly correct and guide them. Specifically, this paper presents a descriptive study of three methods that address the monitoring process in a different way: the first using joint coordinates, the second based on bones coordinates and the last using the angles generated by the bones. Following the analysis of these three different mechanisms, the authors discuss the reason to identify the use of joint coordinates as the best technique to monitor patients in this kind of movement-based interaction systems. Such technique has been applied in the development of SIVIRE. Finally, we present the results of the evaluation of the system implemented with this monitoring mechanism. The outcomes prove that SIVIRE offers a reliable and useful tool to support rehabilitation therapies, both for patients and physiotherapists.

HidroMORE 2: An optimized and parallel version of HidroMORE

HidroMORE software was developed in the Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) section from the University of Castilla-la Mancha to extend the Evapotranspiration assessment to a regional scale, implementing the FAO-56 methodology and the assimilation of the basal crop coefficient from Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) images calculated from satellite images. However, when this software deals with high dimension images, the performance greatly decays. Currently, HidroMORE is being required for carring out calculations that result unapproachable in its current state. In this work HidroMORE 2 is presented where a High Performance Computing approach has been considered to manage the complexity of HidroMORE software. The work presented here takes into account two main aspects in order to improve the performance: improvements on input/output operations, that is, a better manage of hard disk operations; and on the other hand the use of Parallel Computing by exploiting current computer architectures, in particular, multicore architectures.

Improving Context-Awareness in Healthcare Through Distributed Interactions

Context-aware systems represent an appropriate tool for healthcare environments. The capability to offer necessary information and functionality on the basis of a user’s context makes it possible to create better working environments for medical staff. Current technology supports greater customization, thus enabling the improvement of user interaction. This paper describes a significant step forward in the concept of context-awareness with a comprehensive solution: Ubi4Health. The solution enhances context-awareness by adapting the user experience in accordance with the device, interface and interaction mechanism used in a given context.

3D editor to define generic rehabilitation therapies as a source to monitor and guide patients

The rehabilitation domain has found the movement interaction as an important factor of improvement. Evidence of this are the current efforts to develop systems to monitor remotely patients during their training. The aim is to facilitate implied tasks such as avoiding constant displacements of specialists and patients when possible. However, existing works are applied to specific injuries as dedicated rehabilitation systems leaving aside general treatments. In this sense, this paper presents EVITE, a 3D Virtual editor to define from general to specific exercises based on postures through traditional or movement interaction. The editor generates XML files with a well-defined structure what represents a powerful source for any monitoring systems. The knowledge of the tags composing the files allows those systems to guide the therapy previously define with EVITE. In order to show the feasibility of the work, the paper briefly describes REHABILITA, a monitoring application that makes use of the editor as its source.